How embarrasing!

Matthew K. Meissner meissnem at gmail.com
Thu Jan 10 18:51:06 PST 2008


On Jan 10, 2008, at 7:58 AM, Juan Manuel Palacios wrote:

>
> On Jan 10, 2008, at 6:01 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jan 10, 2008, at 04:08, Markus Weissmann wrote:
>>
>>> On 10 Jan 2008, at 10:13, Kevin Ballard wrote:
<snip>
>>>> What's the purpose of the symlink? I'm surprised we even have it.

If I remember correctly -- it was a long time ago -- the original  
purpose of the symlink was to use the "nearby" manpath searching  
described in man(1).  Without the symlink, the user has to either  
modify the MANPATH env var or the /etc/man.conf file.  Leopard added / 
etc/manpath.d as well.

Personally, I despise the idea of the MacPorts installer mucking with  
my .profile at all -- PATH or MANPATH.  I would find it even more  
distasteful for it to edit /etc/man.conf.  And /etc/manpath.d is  
Leopard only.  So I think the link should stay -- it's the easiest way  
to get man searching working -- as long as PATH is set correctly,  
MANPATH is set implicitly.



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